The present invention relates to electronic devices used to provide information to drivers and more particularly relates to a method and apparatus for utilizing historical data to predict traffic law enforcement patrol patterns, locations, schedules, speed traps, and enforcement profile.
It is well known that road condition information is very important to drivers to improve efficiency and safety of travel. In particular it is beneficial to maximize the amount of relevant road information that is available to drivers and present it in an optimally beneficial way. Heretofore, the most common road condition information has been real time and available from radar detectors for locating immediate traffic law enforcement patrol locations, radar detectors equipped with GPS for detecting locations of red light cameras, fixed speed traps and from the Department of Transportation through GPS based vehicle navigation systems for providing real time road condition data.
However, these techniques primarily provide only real time road condition information and do not provide historic and probabilistic or statistical data. More specifically, data available from traditional radar detectors only provides the driver with immediate law enforcement locations with very little warning. Additionally, current generation radar detectors and smart cell phones equipped with GPS for detecting red light cameras or fixed speed traps only provide fixed location of traffic law enforcement. Additionally, onboard vehicle navigation systems provide only near real time road accident, hazard and condition information. Additionally, exclusive crowd sourced databases of traffic law enforcement encounters are limited and compromised by accuracy of reports. Heretofore, none of the existing driver information apparatus provide the driver with historical statistical and probabilistic data and none predict likely locations of traffic law enforcement or patrol locations, patrol schedules, enforcement profiles, or enforced speed limit.
It is an object of the present invention to provide historic traffic law enforcement patrol information. An additional object of the present invention is to utilize historic traffic law enforcement information to statistically predict the locations, schedules, and enforcement profile where drivers are likely to encounter traffic law enforcement patrols, speed traps, fixed and mobile speed cameras, red light cameras and provide the enforced speed limit.
It is an additional object of the present invention to utilize historic traffic law enforcement patrol citation records to statistically predict the probabilistic locations of traffic law enforcement patrols, enforcement profiles, speed traps and fixed and mobile speed cameras and red light cameras.
An additional object of the present invention is to provide historic and probabilistic traffic law enforcement patrol information, derived from historical traffic law enforcement data, and statistically predict the locations where it is more likely to encounter traffic law enforcement and speed traps and provide maximum safe speeds to avoid citation